Dmitrii Milev
Dmitrii or Dumitru Petrovici Milev was a Bessarabian-born short-story writer and communist militant, active in the Soviet Union's Moldavian Autonomous Republic. During World War I, he served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, and was decorated for bravery. Already sympathetic to socialist ideas, he embraced the Bolshevik ideology around the time of the October Revolution; he was strongly opposed to Greater Romania, and, after the Romanian–Bessarabian unification, foght in the Bolshevik underground. Arrested and indicted in 1919, he escaped custody and helped prepare the Tatarbunary Uprising. Upon its quashing, Milev made his way into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was a cradle for Moldovenism and the MASSR.
Though originating from a community of Bessarabian Bulgarians, Milev identified with the Moldavian ethnicity, which he viewed as distinct from the Romanians. More controversially, he advocated for a "Moldavian language", which he used in his contributions to proletarian literature—and which later scholarship regarded as "gibberish". He was upheld as the MASSR's first short-story writer, as well as a pioneer translator. Working alongside Samuil Lehtțir, he helped establish the MASSR's cultural institutions, and served as president of the Moldavian Union of Writers. Advancing through the ranks of the Ukrainian Communist Party, he had contributions to both land collectivization and the literacy campaign. His short prose was a contribution to Soviet propaganda, focusing mainly on depicting the Romanian Kingdom as a bourgeois or fascist polity, which terrorized its "Moldavian" peasants and the Bessarabian Jews.
Milev was explicit in his critique of Soviet Latinization, but later renounced Cyrillic and adapted himself to the Soviet version of the Romanian alphabet. He was still identified as a Latinizer, and therefore a Romanian-financed saboteur, with the onset of the Great Purge. Milev was shocked by these developments, and maintained his friendship with disgraced figures—including Grigore Starîi, who joined him in translating the 1936 Soviet Constitution. After a period of uncertainty, in which he was allowed to reprise his literary work, he was arrested and tortured by the NKVD cell at Tiraspol. He confessed to being a spy, then recanted, but was still put to death in that city's prison. Within twenty years of this event, de-Stalinization had him rehabilitated, and included among the founders of Moldovan literature. Milev's posthumous vindication was used by young authors in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to push for more creative liberties.
Biography
Early life and activities
Milev was born on January 2, 1887, at Baurci-Moldoveni, in what was then Izmailsky Uyezd, in Imperial Russia's Bessarabia Governorate. Romanian scholar Nichita Smochină reports his ethnicity as Bulgarian, noting that he was "from a wealthy family." By contrast, an official biography, panned in 1959 by V. Tolochenko, had it that: "His parents were poor peasants who did not have their own land or even their own house, and were forced to rent small plots of land from the rich, paying for it with backbreaking labor and large taxes. From an early age, after the death of his parents, D. Milev earned his bread with his own labor." Only completing his basic education, at parochial school No 1, Milev held a variety of jobs: he was a laborer in a brick factory, a baker in a shop owned by wealthy Greeks, and a coffee-shop waiter; for a while, he lodged with his uncle in Bolgrad. After moving to Tiraspol, where he lodged on Pokrovsky Lane, he volunteered the 56th Zhytomyr Infantry Regiment. While in the army, he became acquainted with the Russian Social Democrats, sympathized with their cause, and was arrested when he helped in the escape of a comrade by the name of Koltsov.Released from the army, Milev returned to his native province. He contributed to the newspaper Bessarabskaya Zhizn, and tried to obtain employment as a schoolteacher—but his application was ruled out due to his political unreliability. He then returned under arms from the first days of World War I, during a general mobilization in summer 1914. Milev spent some two years on the Eastern Front, receiving "two wounds and a concussion". His bravery was rewarded by the Russian Empire, which granted him the Order of Saint Vladimir and the right to use a gilded ceremonial weapon. He also obtained an officer's rank, as Shtabs-kapitan; in a 1956 interrogation by the KGB, Milev's activist friend Ion Ocinschi reported that "he never made a secret of this."
File:На освобождение Бессарабии, Soviet of Working Deputies of Odessa poster, 1919.png|thumb|upright=1.04|Bolshevik recruitment poster, calling for the "liberation of Bessarabia". Published in Odessa in or around 1919
Milev was brought back into politics by the February Revolution, during which time he took part in "heated debates of the regimental military revolutionary committee". He was again taken out by a wound received during the Kerensky offensive, and had to recover at a military hospital in Kiev. The young veteran was again in Bessarabia "at the very beginning of 1918". Some reconstructions of his biography suggest that he identified with the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution and under the Moldavian Democratic Republic, fleeing Bessarabia during, or shortly after, the Romanian expedition; he therefore opposed the union of Bessarabia with Romania. As Tolochenko puts it: "Milev soon became a witness to the atrocities of the rabid invaders . But Milev did not become a passive and submissive observer of these events, and instead was an active fighter for the liberation and reunification of Bessarabia with the Soviet Union." Tolochenko recounts that Milev had joined the Soviet Communist Party and was assigned "various important assignments". Milev was pursued and arrested by the Kingdom of Romania in 1919. He was afterwards indicted in a "Trial of the 108". By his own account, he was "incredibly lucky", only receiving a two-year prison term, when 19 co-defendants had been sentenced to death. According to Tolochenko, Milev then broke out of prison and rejoined the Bolshevik underground. He participated in the Tatarbunary Uprising of 1924, and only fled Bessarabia during the subsequent repression—by crossing the Dniester into Soviet territory.
According to Smochină, Milev's settling in the MASSR gave him privileged status, since, as an outcast from Bessarabia-proper, he could contribute propaganda against Greater Romania. His original debut was as a poet—his verse was taken up in Plugarul Roșu, alongside works by Mihai Andriescu, Teodor Malai, and Pavel Chioru. Milev and Chioru were early adherents of the grammarian Leonid Madan, who had theorized that the "Moldavian language" was entirely unlike Romanian, and who invited writers to fabricate a "Moldavian socialist" lexis. With I. Cușmăunsă, they co-wrote a text which argued that: "We have no need for Romanian literary grammar, since that sort of grammar would completely stifle our Moldavian language". In 1926, Milev, already "one of the MASSR's most prominent writers", published Norod moldovenesc, which criticized both Imperial Russia and Greater Romania for having denied Moldavians "the right to be human", keeping them "subjugated and nameless". Historian Charles King suggests that Milev followed propagandist Vladimir Dembo in describing the "emancipatory power of the Bolshevik Revolution" for the Moldavians as a separate people, with full liberation only attainable once Bessarabia had been Sovietized.
Lionized author
Milev was initially affiliated with the Moldavian Regional Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and assigned by it to the October Revolution Study Section. He and Ocinschi were therefore involved in the project to publish "the classics of Marxism-Leninism" in their "Moldavian" version. A "Milev D.", seen by literary historian Eugen Lungu as "in all likelihood Dumitru Milev", penned a translation of Une nuit dans les marais, the short story by Romanian communist Panait Istrati. Done from the Russian version, it was published in 1926 by the Moldavian State Publishing House of Balta, as O noapti'n baltî. Lungu notes that it may be "the first Romanian language version of that well-known work of prose", though the Moldavian avatar of the language, in both Milev's version and the preface, was bordering on "gibberish". He adds: "I do not know if Panait Istrati has ever come across this 'Romanian' translation", but also that Istrati's "extreme indignation" with poor-quality renditions of his work into standard Romanian allows one to "imagine what this great unfortunate Istrati would have said, if he had ever managed to read the Balta edition."Milev made it into the Soviet literary pantheon with Moș Gorițî, originally featured in Plugarul of 1926. It is described by Tolochenko as "the first work of fiction in Moldavian Soviet literature", and also as a record of the Moldavians' "fierce hatred for the occupiers". Despite his moniker, Gorițî, who was allegedly based on a real-life person, appeared as a 30-something veteran of World War I. Upon his return to Cetireni village, he issues a protest against the oppressive Gendarmerie, but is captured, tortured, and finally imprisoned as a "Bolshevik". Milev, alongside authors such as Lehtțir and Chioru, pioneered Marxist literary criticism in the MASSR—with results deemed "quite modest" by literary historian Mihai Cimpoi. In April 1928, Milev founded the literary club Răsăritul, also serving as editor of the magazines Moldova Literară and Octombrie. In August of that year, Milev and Gavril Buciușcan were members of a welcoming committee which greeted Istrati, who was passing through Balta on his tour of the Soviet Union; in his account of the meeting, Istrati called the MASSR a "Romanian butterfly on the Soviet elephant".
Buciușcan's Russian–Moldavian dictionary, the Slovar, came out in 1929 with Chioru and Milev as editors. The same year, Milev translated from Maxim Gorky, producing Temnița, which later reviewers have claimed as the first Gorky book to appear in "Moldavian". On June 1, 1929, Răsăritul hosted the first Moldavian writers' congress, which elected Milev as its chairman, seconded by Lehtțir. As noted by Ocinschi, he was a political figure of importance in the KPU of MASSR, and personally involved in the land collectivization campaign, including as a collector of grain. He continued to write prose: published by Octombrie in 1931, Pi douî maluri was praised by Ocinschi and panned by Smochină. As summarized by scholar Petru Negură, it showed Bessarabia as overwhelmed by the Gendarmerie, in service to the prosperous and exploitative bourgeois class who "would do anything to get rid of the peasants". The piece also alleged that destitute Bessarabians risked punishments for communism, "a word that most of them have not even heard", whenever they dared protest; conversely, it claimed that Bessarabians waved red flags on October Revolution Day, and thus marked their support for the MASSR.
Milev's core contribution to literature was a booklet titled Călătórii, or "stories from occupied Bessarabia". Printed in Tiraspol in 1930, it was celebrated by his colleague Lehtțir as "precious for our literature, but also from a historical point of view", in that it "recall those blood-stained days of the Romanian boyars in Bessarabia." Smochină rated the sketches as "below mediocrity", though noting that humorous fragments, such as Stănescu and Eu gioc în cărți, show more stylistic vigor in their depiction of petty corruption. Tolochenko disliked the latter piece for its treatment of the positive hero, the Polish student Vasile; he notes that, overall, Milev was "weaker" in his portrayals of innocent bystanders and Bolshevik heroes. Overall, he found that the author's merit was political, since Milev "correctly understood the life and political situation, took up the proper positions within the party, and, to the best of his ability, depicted one of the milestone periods in the history of the Moldavian people." In addition to including a reprint of Moș Gorițî, Călătórii states similar claims about Romanian abuse against native Bessarabians, spread out across several other stories; the title piece, Călătórii, shows Romanian students arriving in Ungheni to disrupt the local Jewish community.
In early 1932, Milev and Ocinschi tried to oppose Soviet Latinization, which briefly adopted the Romanian alphabet as a national standard for "Moldavian". Writing in early 1936, Smochină suggested that: "Intellectually, Milev is exactly at that same cultural level he had back when he left Bessarabia. Favored by circumstances, he did not know how to make use of them and cultivate himself; hence, his star shall fade out as a new generation takes over." The scholar sees Milev's writing after Latinization as fully incomprehensible to his target audience of workers, superficial, and entirely devoid of narrative logic. Milev's one play, Două lumi was performed at the Tiraspol State Theater in late 1933. According to Smochină, it was the inaugural production of that new institution, though Colesnic provides evidence that the distinction actually goes to Lehtțir's Biruința. Overall, Două lumi builds on the vision of Bessarabia as abandoned to the Romanian persecutors; according to Smochină, it is "unaccomplished"—not least of all because of its "incomprehensible language", almost entirely modeled on the Madan standards. The text had the particularity of being partly rooted in "contemporary life", whereas most of Milev's stories had been entirely about his Romanian past.